Lying to youngsters doesn’t pay: study

Pretty much every parent of a young child has told the occasional white lie to preserve his or her sanity. You might, for example, say: “I went to the bank” and leave out the fact that you also stopped for frozen yogurt to avoid the inevitable meltdown that would follow the realization of a missed treat. Harmless, right? Maybe not. According to a new Stanford study, kids as young as four are pretty skilled at spotting “sins of omission” and then judging the adults who perpetrate them.

That might be bad news for some parents, but it’s good news for child development experts, who say such an early ability to detect when technically accurate information is misleading bodes well for the educational progress of children.

“If children are sensitive to others’ informativeness — for instance, able to distinguish less informative teachers from fully informative ones — that will be helpful for their future learning,” said Hyowon Gweon, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford and the study’s lead author. In one experiment with four year olds, her team taught children about two toys, one with just one function and another with four functions. The kids watched back-to-back videos of puppets teaching Elmo about the toys.

The puppet who was supposed to be explaining the four-function toy, however, showed Elmo only one function. The children were having none of it. Seventy-two percent of the kids liked the more informative teacher better, which suggests even very young children are learning which adults to trust.